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Jack Stocker: A One-Man Festival of Chemistry
Chemistry has always boasted an amazing and entertaining set of peripatetic raconteurs who add class, sparkle, and warmth to our national meetings. Derek Davenport, Hubert Alyea, Max Gergel, Howie Peters, Bill Carroll, and Bassam Shakhashiri are but a few members of that cohort. Bowtie-wearing, beret-topped Jack Stocker, however, was chief of this club of colorful characters. In the halls, in the nearby streets, or on the exposition floor of a chemistry meeting, if you saw Jack ambling into view, clad in his green sweater vest, tweed jacket, lapels ladened with buttons and badges, you knew you were about to be treated to an entertaining conversation on chemage (more later), fascinating examples of nomenclature, humorous yarns, and even cutting edge chemistry told with an historical bent. Sometimes Jack would be passing out membership cards for the International Dull Men’s Club (“We Celebrate the Unremarkable”); sometimes it would be slightly ribald badges (“Book Lovers Never Go to Bed Alone”), and sometimes paperbacks on the secrets of New Orleans cooking (“First You Make a Roux”). He xi In A Festival of Chemistry Entertainments; Stocker, J., et al.; ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2013.
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traveled with pockets and bags full of props, hand-outs and fascinating paperbacks he’d acquired at book shows with each friend’s interests in mind. You always left with more than you came with when you encountered Jack at a meeting. Jack was never dull! You treasured every moment in his presence. Jack was, in fact, a Renaissance man, a chemist with many interests and many friends among academics, book collectors, historians, Mardi Gras krews, and ACS loyalists. Jack made the cover of C&EN (21 November 2005) over the headline “Faces of the Storm” about the tragic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the infamous Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Most of book-lover Jack’s >20,000 volume collection of fantasy and science fiction books was destroyed when Katrina breached the levies. He was hard at work rebuilding his personal library (heavy with genre fiction) when he passed. Jack was always generous to a fault and had supplied several of his friends with copies of his files and book holdings. Those friends helped him begin the rebuilding of his flood-destroyed library. Jack called his science trivia collection “chemage,” a made-up word linking chemistry and garbage, whose creation he attributed to one of one of his young son’s response to the question, “What does your father do?” Jack was charmed by his son’s insight and for the many years he traveled on the ACS Tour Speaker circuits he entitled his lecture “Chemage.” From 1958 till his retirement in 1991 Jack taught at the University of New Orleans. During his long teaching and research career (organic electrochemistry) he took sabbaticals at Oak Ridge National Labs and at the University of Lund (Sweden). Among Jack’s many entertaining stories were his remembrances of turning a decommissioned air base into a new New Orleans’ university and helping it grow from granting associate degrees, to undergraduate and graduate degrees, and ultimately to being a broad-based research institution. He was proud of the University of New Orleans for its achievements in chemistry education but he especially enjoyed serving as advisor to the UNO Student Science Fiction and Fantasy Club. The group became known as Survivors of the Big Bang or SOB2. Elected to the ACS National Council by the Louisiana Section in 1972, Jack held the New Orleans seat until his death. He served in countless local section, regional, and national committee assignments including Nomenclature, Nominations and Elections, Meetings and Expositions, Economic and Professional Affairs, and the Committee on Science. From his personal experience, Jack wrote a procedures manual on how to run a successful regional ACS meeting. For decades it was the definitive reference for countless Chairs of such meetings. Jack himself served as Chair of the Division of the History of Chemistry in 1990. He was elected to the Council Policy Committee and appointed as the ACS Representative to the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF) Council. Jack knew the ACS inside and out. Jack loved history and he especially loved books. He enjoyed participating in the Bolton Society, a bibliophilic group within CHF before which he frequently spoke and where he displayed rare books on chemistry and science fiction from his pre-Katrina collection. Jack organized and chaired a symposium “Chemistry and Science Fiction” at the April 1992 ACS National Meeting in San Francisco. In his paper for that symposium and in the ACS symposium volume he edited, Chemistry and Science Fiction, he discussed many of the best examples from his xii In A Festival of Chemistry Entertainments; Stocker, J., et al.; ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2013.
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collection. At the time of his death he was editing this book on A Festival of Chemistry Entertainment derived from a symposium he organized and chaired at the ACS National Meeting in spring 2008 in New Orleans. A Festival of Chemistry Entertainment is more than the fruit of Jack’s last and most successful symposium. It’s also a memorial presentation by his friends to Jack and to a subject he held dear – the use of humor and whimsy for the entertainment and education of chemists. Enjoy! Or as Jack would have said, laissez les bon temps rouler!
Ned D. Heindel Department of Chemistry 6 East Packer Avenue Lehigh University Bethlehem, Pennsylvania 18015
[email protected] (e-mail)
xiii In A Festival of Chemistry Entertainments; Stocker, J., et al.; ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2013.
